1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to computer systems and, more particularly, to backup and restoration of data within computer systems.
2. Description of the Related Art
There is an increasing need for organizations to protect data that is associated with a variety of applications via some type of backup mechanism. For example, popular email and collaboration servers such as Microsoft Exchange® and IBM® Lotus® Domino® have associated data that may be critical to an organization's operation. Data associated with these servers may be stored in one or more databases along with application-specific metadata. One approach to protecting data associated with these servers is to save an image of the database. Such an approach may be less than satisfactory because the data's associated application may not be able to readily recognize the saved image and associated metadata needed to properly access the data from within the application. It is often necessary to backup metadata that captures the context of the data as well as the data itself. In addition, it may be necessary to store the data context in order to enable restoration of selected portions of an application's data. Such restorations may be referred to as granular recovery.
Generally speaking, application servers provide various backup facilities such as APIs through which to backup data and associated metadata. Unfortunately, the capabilities of these APIs and similar mechanisms may be limited. For example, the Domino® server product provides a backup API that can be called locally by a backup agent in order to backup data and metadata stored in the server's Notes Storage Facility (NSF) format. The Domino® server product requires that the agent be installed on the same host as the application server and its local NSF database. However, the Domino® product also allows data to be stored remotely in other databases, such as in a remote installation of IBM's database management system DB2, also know as NSFDB2. Unfortunately, to use the backup APIs for these remote databases, additional agents must be installed on each remote host. Making a backup of such complex configurations involves obtaining authority to access the backup APIs in multiple locations as well as coordination among multiple backup agents.
In addition to the above considerations, additional limitations may be imposed when an incremental backup is attempted. In order to produce an incremental backup, backup applications may require that the targeted application server be configured to perform archive logging in order to provide the information needed to determine what data qualifies for a given incremental backup. Unfortunately, archive logging may cause poor performance. As a result, archive logging may be unsuitable for various applications.
In view of the above, an effective system and method for allowing both full and incremental backups and granular recovery to be performed on both local and remote databases is desired.